


Counting scars

by type_here



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Definitely contemplative, Kinda sad?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-09-11
Packaged: 2018-12-26 15:15:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12061614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/type_here/pseuds/type_here
Summary: Apart and counting the shards of a broken heart.





	Counting scars

One:  
You drink yourself close to oblivion again. It's better than many things in your life. It's better than the many scars making constellations on your skin, better than the time you let slip by as you wait for the slow and inevitable outcome of all life.

Ten:   
The quietness of the room belittles the loudness of his feelings. His heart breaks and shatters like spun glass, it’s wrecked like the trust he has put in this petulant detective he hopelessly fell in love with. All he can do is leave all this behind.

Two:  
The haze of the bar. The haze of alcohol clouding your mind and judgement. The haze of the night as you walk back home with a stranger. The haze of thoughts and feeling as long hands touch you. The haze of regrets in the acrid morning.

Nine:  
Another fake name, another passport, another shuttle ticket, another galaxy. Everything he does feels like a dream, nothing felt real since leaving Brahma. Nothing has been real except his lips, that night in this unforgettable city. He shakes his head, he needs to live the dream.

Three:  
The loneliness creeps in, icy fingers numbing you to the world. It seizes you by the throat to leave you speechless. Your hands curl up into fists and your rage to outsiders seem aimless. You know it’s all for yourself, this anger, and also against you.

Eight:  
For having a life that is like a dream, his nights are strangely dreamless. Those too few times where he does dream are more like nightmares, tinted red and drenched with blood. He wakes up drenched in sweat, wondering about all the what could have beens.

Four:  
The nightmares are the worst. Nights, after nights, after nights, you lose him again in the cruellest, meanest, way. The world implodes from a Martian bomb, the both of you with it, him just a fraction of a second ahead of you. You wake up screaming.

Seven:  
He tries to never go back to a city he went to before. It’s a matter of pride and survival. Yet, when someone pays him handsomely to retrieve an item on a certain little red planet, he can’t help but want to break his unsaid oath.

Five:   
You get a call, you get a job, you fail at it. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s better than staring at the walls of your apartment or your office. It’s better than yet another hangover. It’s better than thinking too hard about him. You get a call.

Six:  
The city is too familiar for his comfort, yet so foreign. His mark is within touching distance when something catches his attention. It’s the glimpse of a familiar coat. He spins around, the crowd is too dense to see. He loses them both, ghosts who disappeared.

Six:   
The crowd is dense, you lose your target. You spin around on yourself, frustrated by this turn of event. It’s when you sense it, a smell you’ll never forget, burned forever in your mind. He can’t be here, why the ghost of him haunt you so?

Five:   
He too disappears. Mars is but a red dot against the darkness of the universe. He wishes his feelings hadn’t betrayed him back then, that he hadn’t felt so angry. He should have talked to him, maybe then he could have understood. Too late for that.

Seven:  
You try to lose yourself in the bottle and in the bodies you find in the dead of the night. You try to deaden the feelings resurfacing by magnifying the pain with the fights you find in the dead of the night. It’s all you deserve.

Four:  
He dances the night away. He is the foreign Count of some small asteroid, wooing some socialite with too much money on their hands. All to steal some heirloom jewellery. It was nothing like watching his goddess waltzing through danger. He so dearly misses this sight.

Eight  
She's not him, he’s not him, they’re not him. They are fragments of him like you are fragments of yourself. You break night after night when you finally know the details will never measure up to the whole. The pieces of your heart sharpen to points.

Three:  
There’s an art piece in a small museum on Ganymede. It’s too damning to be removed from its spot on the wall and carried around. So whenever he got some time, he stops by and spend hours watching the beautiful painting of an old Earth goddess.

Nine  
They come and go, never sticking around, never important enough for you to want them. Inconsequential and unrequited, wanted only for a night, for a detail that catches your eye, a sparkling stone at an ear, a sharp grin, long hands and soft skin against yours. 

Two:  
He never tells his true name to anyone else. He keeps it close to the shards of his broken heart. All this time, he thought it would be better., easier. Despite putting the feelings in a box in the far corner of his mind, it doesn’t.

Ten:  
You seek the one you left behind. This is a revelation in the dead of night, a painful lurching of your heart. His name dies on your lips, a prayer to this angel gallivanting through the stars. A hope against all hopes that he’ll forgive you.

One:  
Another star system. He said he would leave and it would be that, but deep down he wishes he had fought more for this. He thinks that he could forgive if given the chance. He hopes against all hope that their path will cross again someday.

Zero:  
Light years apart, they count the scars left behind. It’s better to think that it wouldn’t have worked, that things would have been terrible in the end. It’s better to think that way than all the good that could have come out of it, if only they had allowed themselves this. Just another scar to add to the count.


End file.
